This is the IndyCar camera angle that Formula 1 needs

I’d argue that the camera work in Formula 1 really doesn’t do the sport justice.

The cars are the fastest in the biz, but the use of wide, big-lens camera shots can make them look much slower than they actually are, and the use of oddly placed onboard cameras shows very little of what’s going on behind the wheel.

Thankfully, IndyCar knows how to do camera angles properly. The onboard footage in the video below comes from last weekend’s Detroit Grand Prix event, and it’s exactly the sort of stuff Formula 1 should be doing,

We’ve been given the forehead-high view of eventual Detroit winner Graham Rahal, filmed from around 10cm above his eyeline, providing us with an accurate view of what it’s like to be an IndyCar driver. And while there’s not one overtake, one major slide or a single brush of the barriers in the footage, it’s one of the most exciting onboard clips I’ve seen yet.

You can see first hand the amount of energy and focus that is required to drive a car like this on a street circuit. The car pushes wide on corner entry; Rahal fights kickback through the wheel; he opts not to change up in some parts and lets the turbocharged V6 Honda engine behind bite into its limiter; the car bottoms out and the wheel goes light in Rahal’s hands; his body is shoved further into the cockpit as he brakes hard…

I could write hundreds of words about how spectacular this footage - which comes from his lap record-breaking qualifying run - is to watch, but I’ll shut up and let the video do the rest of the talking.

Join the debate

I agree that they should have helmet cameras in F1, I also like the rotating camera that is placed on the top of the Indycars so you can see cars coming up from behind. The other camera angle that really shows the speed of the cars is the one they had on the fence at the Indy 500 which showed the flowers being buffeted by the air coming off the cars as they went by at over 220mph.

That's the first of those Helmet Camera's I've seen that actually works for me, most of the time I've never found them that great. I remember watching a Vettel era Red Bull with GoPro's on it and couldn't believe how much better the footage was from it being Wide Angle and not the standard camera.